Posts tagged Steve Jobs

Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Pixar’s Ed Catmull on Their Friend, Steve Jobs (Video)

Good interview by Walt Mossberg at the D10 conference with Larry Ellison and Ed Catmull—both friends of Steve Jobs—where they talk about Steve, his accomplishments, what made him successful, and why no one can ever be quite like him.

How Tim Cook is changing Apple

Adam Lashinsky, Fortune:

A 14-year veteran of the company, Cook is maintaining, by words and actions, most of Apple’s unique corporate culture. But shifts of behavior and tone are absolutely apparent; some of them affect the core of Apple’s critical product-development process. In general, Apple has become slightly more open and considerably more corporate. In some cases Cook is taking action that Apple sorely needed and employees badly wanted. It’s almost as if he is working his way through a to-do list of long-overdue repairs the previous occupant (Jobs) refused to address for no reason other than obstinacy.

Very insightful piece exploring how Tim Cook is changing things at Apple since becoming CEO.

Apple’s response on its tax practices (and how Tim Cook handles things differently to Steve Jobs)

Over the weekend The New York Times published a piece entitled ‘How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Taxes’. Apple then chose to publicly respond with a statement that I’ve linked to in full above. Here’s the first section though:

Over the past several years, we have created an incredible number of jobs in the United States. The vast majority of our global work force remains in the U.S., with more than 47,000 full-time employees in all 50 states. By focusing on innovation, we’ve created entirely new products and industries, and more than 500,000 jobs for U.S. workers — from the people who create components for our products to the people who deliver them to our customers. Apple’s international growth is creating jobs domestically since we oversee most of our operations from California. We manufacture parts in the U.S. and export them around the world, and U.S. developers create apps that we sell in over 100 countries. As a result, Apple has been among the top creators of American jobs in the past few years.

What is interesting to me as an observer of Apple is not so much Apple’s tax practices, but their decision to speak up and respond at all seems like a real shift in how Apple handles situations like this. If Steve Jobs was still at the helm, you can be sure that Apple would have said nothing at all. Steve wouldn’t have felt the need to respond. Since Tim Cook has become CEO we’re seeing Apple respond much more frequently to these kind of situations. There’s no doubt that, despite being fully bought into the Apple culture that Steve created, Tim is very much his own man and adding his own stamp on things.

Into The Wild: Lost Conversations From Steve Jobs' Best Years

Brent Schlender, Fast Company:

If there’s anything that parallels Apple’s decade-long string of hits—iMac, PowerBook, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, to list just the blockbusters—it’s Pixar’s string of winners, including Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, WALL-E, and Up. These insanely great products could have come only from insanely great companies, and that’s what Jobs had learned to build.

This is a fascinating and deeply insightful article on Steve Jobs by someone who spent a lot of time interviewing him. It’s intriguing to see just how influential Steve’s non-Apple years were and how his time at Pixar was so foundational to how he would later reshape Apple when he returned.

New Insight Into How Steve Jobs Thought Different

In a word: simplicity.

The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson in an article for HBR:

I think the real lessons from Steve Jobs have to be drawn from looking at what he actually accomplished. I once asked him what he thought was his most important creation, thinking he would answer the iPad or the Macintosh. Instead he said it was Apple the company. Making an enduring company, he said, was both far harder and more important than making a great product.

Lots of insightful and thought-provoking observations about leadership. Well worth a read for any leader.

Steve Jobs: "We should only go into markets where we can make a significant contribution to society"

Tim Cook, talking about how Steve Jobs shaped the culture at Apple:

Steve grilled in all of us over many years that the company should revolve around great products and that we should stay extremely focused on a few things rather than try to do so many that we did nothing well. We should only go into markets where we can make a significant contribution to society — not just sell a lot of products. And so these things along with keeping excellence as an expectation of everything in Apple.

This is a really insightful take on Apple’s approach to bringing products to market.

Fascinating insight into the relationship between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs

Mary Riddell in The Telegraph:

The atmosphere changed in 2007 when Gates left Microsoft to set up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with his wife. “Steve and I did an event together, and he couldn’t have been nicer…I got a fair bit of time with him in his last year. Some months before Jobs died, Gates paid him a long visit. “We spent literally hours reminiscing and talking about the future.” Later, with his old adversary’s death imminent, he wrote to him. “I told Steve about how he should feel great about what he had done and the company he had built. I wrote about his kids, whom I had got to know.”

That last gesture was not, he says, conciliatory. “There was no peace to make. We were not at war. We made great products, and competition was always a positive thing. There was no [cause for] forgiveness.” After Jobs’s death, Gates received a phone call from his wife, Laurene. “She said; ‘Look, this biography really doesn’t paint a picture of the mutual respect you had.’ And she said he’d appreciated my letter and kept it by his bed.”

I find it somewhat heartwarming to see the genuine friendship that - in the latter years at least - seems to have existed between these two tech leaders.

Larry Page’s “Beautiful” New Google

Sarah Lacy at PandoDaily:

I think we’d all consider “simple” and “easy to use” as hallmarks of Google’s product aesthetic, as is “clean,” “spartan,” “stark” and even “geeky,” given the multi-colored logo and large, whimsical sculptures that dot the campus.

But the emphasis on “beautiful” seems a departure. Particularly from Google’s more gritty throw-it-out-in-beta-and-see-what-sticks past.

Is it just me or does it seem like the Google brain trust all got copies of the Steve Jobs biography for Christmas?

This whole article is a really great look at the changes taking place at Google. And it asks some very important questions about what this means.

This question in particular seems very relevant in terms of how Google are changing their search results:

Is Google moving from being a company that organizes the world’s information to one that organizes the information of “your” world?

The integration of social to search results has the effect of changing everything. No longer do we all see the same thing when we search for something. It’s supposedly more relevant but it’s undoubtedly less neutral and less trustworthy.

Sarah nails it with this final paragraph:

As someone who goes to Google more times a day than any other site, I hope I’m wrong about how deep this change in philosophy is among Google’s leadership. I already have two companies who make sense of my world for me: Twitter and Facebook. I don’t need a third. I need a clean, reliable search engine and email service I can trust.

The tech world could probably use more jerks like Steve Jobs

MG Siegler responds to the reactions from many to the Steve Jobs biography and how he comes across as such a jerk and argues that, in fact, the tech industry would benefit from more people behaving like Steve Jobs:

Being a “yes” man really isn’t all that helpful. What startups and tech companies need are doses of reality.

The truth is that it’s a hell of a lot easier to be a “yes” man than to be a jerk. You’re the nice guy, you’re everybody’s friend, you say winning things, you make everyone feel great. Meanwhile, the jerk makes every situation awkward. Both sides feel bad. It sucks.

But I’d argue that the latter is actually much more helpful.

I agree with much of this. Being nice is often placed above telling the truth. And telling the truth is always the better option - even if it makes you less friends. I think there are ways you can go about telling people the truth though and, in my mind at least, there’s no doubt that Steve Jobs often went about telling the truth in intentionally mean ways. So my advice is to tell the truth but to do it wisely, sensitively, and encouragingly. But recognise that the truth will not always be received well and people often won’t like you as a result (no matter how sensitively you say it).

Is Steve Jobs replaceable?

Nick Bilton interviewing Walter Isaacson, author of the Steve Jobs biography, in the New York Times:

Can [Steve Jobs] be replaced at Apple?

He can’t be replaced by one person, but two people can replace him. Tim Cook is the business side of Steve’s brain. He’s meticulous, scientific and business-like. Jony Ive is the artistic, emotional, romantic side of Steve. The two of them together are an incredible team that will hold together very well.

This does make a lot of sense. What will be interesting to see is whether together they have the same sort of authority and control over everything at Apple the way Steve so clearly did.

HT: The Brooks Review

Everyone wins: Adobe to stop developing Flash for Android

ZDNET has got the scoop on some very interesting news: Adobe is going to cease development on mobile browser Flash and refocus its efforts on HTML5.

My initial reaction to this was that Steve Jobs and Apple have won. Apple - famously - chose to ignore Flash and refuse to run it on any of its mobile devices. It never considered it to be good enough and chose to go with the open HTML5 standard for video playback.

Android phone makers have however tried to make Flash a unique selling point of their devices (whilst playing down the fact that Flash was, to put it nicely, crap). So, this news that Adobe are stopping their development of Flash for mobile browsers would seem to be the final evidence that this is a battle that Apple has won. John Gruber makes the point though that, in fact, the death of Flash on mobile devices is a win for everyone:

Apple didn’t win. Everybody won. Flash hasn’t been superseded in mobile by any sort of Apple technology. It’s been superseded by truly open web technologies. Dumping Flash will make Android better, it will make BlackBerrys better, it will make the entire web better. iOS users have been benefitting from this ever since day one, in June 2007.

It’s definitely interesting that this move will help to ensure that Android, which claims (misleadingly) to be open, to actually fully adopt the open HTML5 standard and leave behind their use of the closed Adobe Flash plugin.

Hopefully this move will also give the BBC a good kick up the backside to get a move on with making the video content on their news site accessible via HTML5!

Steve Jobs and the Saints

James Martin, writing in American Magazine, looks to saints throughout history as a means of understanding the outpouring that has been triggered by the death of Steve Jobs:

By no means—to quote St. Paul—am I suggesting that Steve Jobs was a saint. De mortuis nihil nisi bonum, as they say, but a few who worked with him have spoken of his less-than-saintly actions. Yet for those scratch their heads at the online tributes, the lives of the saints can help explain the powerful appeal of this creative genius. Likewise, the grief over Mr. Jobs’s passing may explain to those more familiar with iPhones than icons something about the appeal of the saints.

This whole article is a really interesting read.